Wild Nights
Emily Dickinson
By: Kimberly Walker
Wild Nights! Wild Nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!
Futile the winds
To a heart in port, -Done with the compass,
Done with the chart!
Rowing in Eden!
Ah! the sea!
Might I but moor
To-night in Thee!
Rhyme Scheme: abbb cded fbgb
"Wild nights! Wild nights!" is a poem of passion
and rapture.
Colonel Higginson wrote
“One poem only I dread a little to print--that
wonderful 'Wild Nights,'--lest the malignant read
into it more than that virgin recluse ever
dreamed of putting there. Has Miss Lavinia [Emily
Dickinson's sister] any shrinking about it? You will
understand & pardon my solicitude. Yet what a
loss to omit it! Indeed it is not to be omitted.”
Colonel Higginson says:
Dickinson is undoubtedly using "luxury" in a meaning used in past languages as:
lust, voluptuousness in the gratification of appetite. The "heart in port" is the lover's
embrace. Yielding themselves to intimacy, they have no need for compass or chart,
which are used to get to a specific destination and are instruments of control and
reason. The sea is a common image for passion; think of the romantic movies
you've seen with the waves crashing or the famous scene with the lovers in the
waves in From Here to Eternity.
Miller, Ruth says:
The primary contrasts in the poem are between port and the sea (about which
cluster ideas of wildness, darkness, winds, danger, and motion). These
contrasts prepare us to find two different hearts:
1. is secure and has no need of compass and chart
2. requires danger.
When we come to the final line, where the speaker expresses a desire to moor
in "Thee," the contrasts, and how we feel about them, determine which heart
we see and where we think it desires to be moored. Most readers take "Thee"
to be the beloved. A few see the pronoun as ambiguous and conclude that sea
and beloved are synonymous. A third possibility is that "Thee" refers only to
the sea.
Emily Dickinson was born
December 10, 1830, in a
town called Amherst,
Massachusetts. Emily
Dickinson never once moved
away from her home town
and lived her last years
there. Emily died on May 15,
1886. Her poems were found
after her death by her sister,
Lavinia Dickinson, only two
of her poems were
published in her lifetime.
Some people say Emily’s
inspiration for her love poems
came from a guy named
Reverend Charles Wadsworth,
who she had met in
Philadelphia in 1854. On the
other hand not much is
known about Emily’s personal
life
Inspiration
A lot of Emily Dickinson’s poetry was inspired by the bible. Her family was big in
church and belonged to the Congregational Church, though Emily herself never
became a member.
Also sources say that Harriet Beecher Stowe was an inspiration in her poetry.
Dickinson is considered a premier
American poet. Dickinson wrote on a
variety of subjects, including nature,
love, death, and immortality. As she
honed the lyric format, Dickinson
developed a unique style, characterized
by compressed expression, and an
exploration of the possibilities of
language.
In 1995 Thomas H. Johnson Edition of
Dickinson’s complete poems prompted
renewed interest in her work. Modern criticism
has focused on Dickinson’s style, structure, use
of language, and her many different themes
found in her poems. Regardless of who the
critic is, most modern scholars incorporate
some discussion of Dickinson’s life experiences
into their examinations of her work.
Google
http://www.biographyonline.net/poets/emily_dickinson.html
http://mith.umd.edu//WomensStudies/ReadingRoom/Poetry/Dickinson/
http://www.google.com/search?q=emily+dickinson&hl=en&rlz=1R2ADSA_enUS478&prmd=i
mvnsoab&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=2WKyTHuD4im8ATQmbCBCQ&sqi=2&ved=0CIMBELAE&biw=1024&bih=540
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/wild.html
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173343
http://www.cswnet.com/~erin/ed8.htm
http://savannah-schroll-guz.suite101.com/understanding-emily-dickinsons-wild-nightsa99747